I’d never been a fan of Godzilla or kaiju movies at large — I guess the pretentious part of me never thought they’d be worth spending time or money on. But since Godzilla Minus One, I’ve become a different person. Big monsters in films are cool, actually, especially if they portray a side of humanity that is seldom seen in action movies. The 2023 film, written and directed by VFX artist Takashi Yamazaki, is the 37th film in the Godzilla franchise, and as someone who has previously expressed distaste for overdrawn franchises, I think this is the one exception. Godzilla Minus One is not just a cool film about a sea monster who terrorizes Japan with its heat ray and annoyingly fast metabolism, it is also a film about the devastating effects of war, the importance of brotherhood, and the perseverance of the human soul in the wake of adversity.
Despite clearly being centered on Godzilla, the film is also very reliant on its human characters. I have been told this is not always the case with Godzilla films; they mostly feature Godzilla and the havoc he wreaks. In this movie, however, the audience gets to really bond with and root for the protagonists, namely Koichi Shikishima, whose story becomes the film's focal point, and the friends and family he makes along the way. Watching this film is like looking over Shikishima’s shoulder for the first third and standing beside him for the rest. The film starts in 1945 with Shikishima as a defecting kamikaze pilot who lands his plane on Odo island and is the only survivor of a Godzilla attack that happened that very same night. Riddled with survivor’s guilt, he returns to a war-torn Tokyo and begins a career in minesweeping to support a makeshift family in the form of a woman, Noriko, and an orphaned child she found named Akiko. The minesweeping job introduces him to the other three main protagonists of the film: Dr. Kenji Noda, a former Naval weapons engineer; Yōji Akitsu, the captain of the boat; and Shirō Mizushima, a sailor who was too young to be drafted into the war. They devise plans to defeat Godzilla and ensure the safety of the people of Japan from the giant monster, and in the process, show the guilt, trauma, and hope that comes with surviving such a devastating time. The plan somewhat succeeds after overcoming a few hurdles along the way (the end credit scene suggests otherwise), and by the end, we feel pride for the fictional people on the screen and a reinvigorated love and hope for the real people around us.
It’s a cliché to say, “the real message is the friends we made along the way,” but it rings especially true for this film. At first, when Noda first proposes an unorthodox plan to sink Godzilla into a room full of war veterans, many are dubious about it. A few of those men even left after being told the plan in full, but those who remained were determined to make the idea a reality because they knew they would once again defend their families and people together. The camaraderie between Shikishima, Noda, Akitsu, and Mizushima was a joy to watch; Shikishima joins their crew a little late, but he gets closer to the rest of the crew throughout the film, eventually letting them become part of his little found family. Noda and Akitsu are particularly protective of Mizushima, the youngest of the crew, and even sometimes act like his overbearing fathers — a show of the love and compassion that perseveres in people, even after the horrors they witnessed a mere handful of years before.
Perhaps the most impressive and shocking thing about this film’s production is that it cost $15 million. Having only seen hearsay about how good the film was online, I didn’t know much about Godzilla Minus One when I sat in the theater. By the visual effects alone, I’d have thought this film cost at least half of what Marvel usually shells out for their films, and it looks even better than any of the MCU films of the last few years. Every single effect is clearly done with precision and intention, and while this isn’t a slight against any of the VFX teams who work tirelessly to meet Marvel’s unrealistic expectations (that’s a whole other can of worms we can discuss at a later time), I do think that Godzilla Minus One very successfully shows that a good blockbuster doesn’t need to cost whole countries’ GDP’s to produce. In fact, Matthew Vaughn’s latest film, Argylle, reportedly cost $200 million to make — over 12 times Godzilla’s budget — and it still doesn’t hold a candle to how much better Godzilla looks.
Much of the discrepancy between the budgeting of Hollywood films and films from everywhere else is the casting. The aforementioned Argylle has a star-studded cast, and so do Marvel movies, but even still, Godzilla goes to show that you don’t have to cast the most in-demand actors of the moment to have a successful film. I would even go so far as to argue that Godzilla’s relatively unknown cast helps immerse the audience in the story that it’s trying to tell — when Dr. Noda is introduced, we accept him as Dr. Noda. We don’t go, “That’s Sam Rockwell as a doctor.” The hope is that, after seeing the accolades this film has gotten, including an Oscar nomination for its VFX, studios will take notes on how to more efficiently use their funds and realize that it’s about bringing on the best people for the job, not the most famous or ‘profitable,’ because that is clearly not what audiences want out of their moviegoing experience.